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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Cassie Sturdevant has a great post up on Healthcare IT Today titled “The New Health IT Consulting Skill Set.” In the post, she talks about the changing Health IT market for consultants. She’s absolutely right that between 2010-2012 it was a white hot market and that the market has since cooled down. As she mentions, that means that clients can be much more selective in who their hire. Then, she outlines a few ways to differentiate yourself as a consultant:

Operations or Clinical Background

Communication Skills

Multi-Faceted Knowledge

Those are some good suggestions and if you read the full article, you can find more details from Cassie on each suggestion. If I were to summarize Cassie’s suggestions, it would be that healthcare organizations will need someone with a much deeper knowledge of EHR and Healthcare IT than they had to have previously.

As I look at the healthcare consulting market going forward, I see two major areas of opportunities: EHR switching and EHR optimization.

EHR Switching – Since the majority of hospitals have now implemented some form of EHR, the new EHR implementation market is drying up. However, that’s not to say that we won’t see a lot of new EHR purchases. These new EHR Purchases will instead be hospitals that are buying a new EHR. This EHR switching takes a lot of effort and skills to do it properly. Plus, it takes an organization that has a deep understanding of both the legacy and new EHR software. Watch for the EHR switching to really spike post-meaningful use.

EHR Optimization – This is a really broad area of work. However, so many of the EHR implementations were done on shortened timelines that almost no EHR optimization occurred during the implementation. This presents a major opportunity. Every organization is going to be looking for ways that they can extract more value out of their EHR investment. Consultants that have deep knowledge about how to get this value will be in high demand.

It’s still an exciting time to be in healthcare IT with lots of opportunities. It’s not the gold rush that it was, but there is still plenty of opportunity to do amazing things with an organization’s healthcare IT.

If you’re looking for a healthcare IT job, be sure to check out these Health IT company job postings: